The present invention relates to a method of enabling a subscriber station to start a settings provisioning process in a WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) system.
WiMAX system lends itself as a lightweight Internet access technology. It is built on top of 802.16 standard family MAC+PHY (Medium Access Control+Physical layer) standard from IEEE (certified by WiMAX). The system standard (higher layers and network) is standardized and certified by WiMAX Forum.
Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standardization forum. Its aim is to facilitate global user adoption of mobile data services by specifying market driven mobile service enablers that ensure service interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators, and networks, while allowing businesses to compete through innovation and differentiation. For example it has produced specifications for the device management using SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language) (OMA DM (Device Management)), data synchronization using SyncML (OMA DS (Data Synchronization)), multimedia messages (MMS) and device rights management (DRM) features.
Almost all new and existing mobile services require some kind of settings to work properly. It is important that settings provisioning for these services is as automatic as possible because subscriber stations such as mobile devices are small and they have limited user interfaces. Manual configuration as a whole is too complex for most of the users of the subscriber stations. In an optimal case, there are no interactive steps that affect to the end user during the settings provisioning procedure. An assumption in the optimal situation is also that the provisioning works over the air, meaning that there is no need to physically attach the device to anywhere. That leads to best user experience.
Open Mobile Alliance has developed a protocol for this purpose which is called OMA DM. It is an extensible and well defined XML (extended Markup Language) based data transfer protocol which can be used to manage a diverse set of settings in the mobile devices. A device which settings are being managed is called a client and the entity that is responsible for maintaining one or more devices is called a server.
In case of the WiMAX networks OMA DM works over HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) which relies on TCP (Transport Control Protocol). With the help of the default settings and DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol), a newly purchased and un-provisioned WiMAX device can obtain IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity. However, this is not enough to start the provisioning session as OMA DM client has to know IP address and port number of the server. OMA has defined a bootstrap message that contains this information.
In the prior art, bootstrap jobs are disclosed. A bootstrap can occur as part of a manufacture of a device or be initiated by a Device Manager server. A server initiated bootstrap sends out the bootstrap message with a push mechanism. However, the server has to know the device address, phone number, or some other mechanism for communicating with the device before initiating the bootstrap. The bootstrap document can be encrypted to ensure that the document is received from the trusted source.